Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Still Use RSS

atthis.link

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 370 posts

Re: I Still Use RSS

#321

Post by loup-vaillant »

breischl wrote: post #266
dialamac wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A big one, that was the case even before social media, is the inherent geekiness of it. "RSS" is an acronym after a geek's heart, most people don't like it. Like WWW, RCA, GE.. (the latter two of the most recognizable and successful brands of all time). got it. (And no one cares what an acronym stands for anyway.. you don’t need to know this to make use of it, it has no bearing. RSS is pretty catchy as far as brand…

RSS as branding - well, I've tried to sell people on it for years. I actually worked at an RSS aggregator startup for 7 years, so I spent a while pushing it. You say "RSS" to most people and their eyes glaze over. >The subscription process is simplicity itself You must've found some different sites than I have, because even sites that have a feed don't make it obvious how. For instance, check out Substack, ex: https:…

My web site has this:

  
    
      
      ...
Unless I screwed something up, it used to be the standard way to tell browsers where the RSS feed for this particular web page are. Back then it was very easy to use, even for Grandma™: just click on the standard RSS icon in your browser, next to the URL bar, and there's your feed. That was your subscribe button.

Then browsers stopped working. No more RSS icon, at least by default. I had to add an explicit link at the bottom of the page, which when cliked on shows an ugly rendition of plaintext XML.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#322

Post by loup-vaillant »

breischl wrote: post #320
dialamac wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.apple.com/rss/ Open this on an Apple or android phone. On iOS this will even prompt you to open the App Store to find a feed reader (#1 is still Feedly). RSS icons were ubiquitous like fb and Twitter icons a few years ago, and anyone could use them. It wasn’t a geek thing, it’s just a market that faded. I’ve never had the feed icon not work on a phone in the last 10 years or a typically installed browser…

Lol, my bad, you're right. It was wildly popular, random people on the street were talking about RSS, everyone in the general non-blogging populace was swapping their favorite feeds, it was amazing. That's probably why Google shut down Reader right at the height of that amazing, broad-based popularity and basically nobody talks about it anymore.

Even if RSS was popular, how could advertising companies like Google and Facebook make money off of it?

Those companies have no incentive that I know of to give their user a reliable (a.k.a non-personalised) feed that let them chose whether they'll get to click through or not. No, they want you to click through first, so you get to see the ads before you even start doom scrolling.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#323

Post by coldpie »

frankfrankfrank wrote: post #315
coldpie wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for Feedly not because I'm interested in any of the Pro features, but because Google Reader taught me that you should pay for things you like so they will stick around.

Although your statement is generally true, I think the remaining flaw in that consideration is the subscription model. It makes you and your information source totally dependent on the whims of others. Sure, maybe they won't shut down, but maybe they will not refuse some insane buyout from a tech tyrant to capture the market and you and the information about you, if they aren't already selling that. The general inter…

Sure. It's the old self-hosted vs cloud problem. I don't have the time or interest to host my own services, so I pay someone else to do it. That comes with its own risks, like you say, but I think the tradeoff is worth it. Having a functioning business model that isn't based on abusing their own users provides some insurance against those problems, I think.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#324

Post by loup-vaillant »

edgartaor wrote: post #267
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long-term Google trends graphs are kind of useless because they're a percentage of queries over a period of time when the demographics of the user base was changing as millions of new people got on the internet. Here's the one for javascript: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=javascri... Clearly javascript has been slowly dying out. But wait, that can't be right. They're also a poor proxy for usage…

Do you know a better alternative? I would like to know

You probably didn't want to come across this way, but we should note that the absence of a better metric is not by itself a reason to use a bad one.

If a metric is sufficiently decorrelated with the thing we want to measure, it should be ignored altogether, regardless of whether we have anything better.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#325

Post by corobo »

dmje wrote: post #160
D13Fd wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unfortunate that it's so tough to track RSS viewers. I'm always tempted to convert the feed to cut-back version just so I can see what posts are actually popular.

Feedburner was always the way. Then Google bought it and I’m not sure what happened next

Almost literally nothing other than the domain changing. Don't remind them they have it, they might shut it down :P

Re: I Still Use RSS

#327

Post by loup-vaillant »

spians wrote: post #109
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #80

Is RSS really so obscure as the site suggests? Every website I am interested in updates from provides a feed. Apparently YouTube content creators receive more money if they have more subscribers, but I don't subscribe and simply use the RSS feed; it's easier. Perhaps YouTube also factors in the number of RSS requæsts they receive.

As a maintainer of an RSS reader app which has its own inventory for suggested feeds, one of the uphill battles is sudden removal of RSS support from various sites. I have a list of feeds which are updated once a month and everytime some sites (both niche and big ones) drop RSS support (Reuters and YouTube removing option to export subscriptions as OPML are major blows in last few months). The reason for these remova…

> Perhaps RSS icon didn't look good with other social media icons on home page

If web browsers didn't stop supporting RSS, that icon would not be needed in the first place. We used to have a standard HTML header to advertise the presence of RSS feeds, and the RSS icon was displayed by the browser, next to the URL bar, always at the same place, accessible by everyone including Grandma™.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#328

Post by thesuitonym »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #314
jamesponddotco wrote: post #105

I think my digital life would be a mess without an RSS feed reader. Because of its existence I do not need to touch Twitter, Reddit, YouTube[1], or any Mastodon instance, for example, as I can just have the updates that interest me from these networks in the comfort of my Feedbin[2] feed. While Hacker News does not provide an interface that notifies you when someone replies to you, hnrss.org provides an RSS feed for…

> Hacker News does not provide an interface that notifies you when someone replies to you This can't be an oversight, the feature is too obvious, too easy to implement. This has to be a deliberate choice. Does anyone know why HN made this choice?

I think the whole commenting system was added as an afterthought. HN is not really a discussion forum, it's a news aggregator where you can discuss posts.

I think that makes it a bit more civil.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#329

Post by avian »

tleb_ wrote: post #289
avian wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, Feedly was the only large centralized feed reader that didn't do subscriber count reporting via UA string for the longest time. They made you do a GET request on some API endpoint if you wanted to get your subscriber count. They implemented it some time back, but it's still kind of buggy - at least for my blog. Two or three different IPs periodically do a GET on my feed URL with the Feedly UA and they all re…

It might not be Feedly?

Seems unlikely, since they are all from the same subnet: x.x.x.25, x.x.x.26, x.x.x.27

Re: I Still Use RSS

#330

Post by robsan »

rsa25519 wrote: post #286
ymolodtsov wrote: post #285

I love RSS but I also believe there's not enough innovation in the space. Feels like most developers are burnt by Facebook and don't ever want to do anything other than providing you with a chronological feed of all feeds. And then you subscribe to too many feeds, get information overload and miss content because you just "Mark all as read" when you're tired. Or skim through the headlines too fast. I'd like an algori…

Feedly does this, although as a college student their Pro+ plan (which organizes by topic) is too pricey for me :-/. I still love the concept. https://feedly.com/i/pro/

Newsblur also has stories training functionality and it's cheaper.
Post reply on HN